


Chance Favors the Mind

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Deadwood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-19
Updated: 2006-12-19
Packaged: 2018-01-25 06:50:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1637432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As the smallpox crisis is winding down, two cantankerous, difficult souls find a measure of common ground.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chance Favors the Mind

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much to T. Jonesy for beta help with this story, and to Lyrastar for ideas and encouragement.
> 
> Written for lanthano

 

 

_Chance favors the mind that is prepared. -Louis Pasteur_

* * *

Pounding jolted Cochran rudely into bleary awareness, and he had cause to curse, not for the first time, whoever'd saw fit to put glass windows in the cabin's front doors.

"Doc! Goddamn it, wake up and open the fucking door!"

"Jesus Christ." Cochran rubbed a hand across eyes that felt grainy and sore with barely alleviated fatigue. It was dark in the cabin; he might have been asleep only a few minutes, or for hours -- it was all the same to his twisted up old bones, which had spent the better part of the last few days hunched over in positions no man his age was meant to hold. He fumbled for his glasses and managed to get them mostly on his face as he struggled to his feet. "All right, all right, I'm comin'."

Jane Cannary's grimy, grinning face waited on the other side of the glass, and it was only when he saw her that his head cleared sufficiently to remember she was supposed to wake him at sundown, let him take over for her at the pest tent after he'd caught a few. By the state of the drunks in the alley, it was getting on in the evening, after ten at least. "Goddamn it," he cursed under his breath. The last thing he needed was her wearing herself out on his account.

He yanked open the door. "I take it by your expression that the place ain't burning to the ground, so mind telling me what's so goddamned important?"

Her grin lit up the night. "Riders come from Cheyenne, Doc. They got the vaccine -- thought you'd want to know."

Cochran braced himself between the door and its frame, letting himself feel some relief at the news. "Well, all right, then." After a moment, wanting nothing so much as to stagger back to bed, he gestured at her to come in and went in search of his coat and his hat, both of which he seemed to have shed somewhere between the door and passing out.

"Bullock says we can set up a clinic at the hardware store in the morning. Says come by, tell him if you need anything."

"What I need," he said as he searched, "is for you to keep in mind that there's a reason we got a schedule going between us."

"What? Oh -- you mean 'cause I didn't send the preacher to wake you when I said I would." She shrugged. "Figured you could do with a few more hours, seein' as I wasn't tired or nothin'."

At the mention of the reverend, Cochran's relief at the good news waned. "How's he doin'?"

"Better, I guess, if by that you mean is he walkin' upright and makin' more sense than a heathen pipe-smoker. We sent that little hairy fella on his fuckin' way a couple hours ago, right as rain, and we ain't had anybody croak since this mornin'." She looked hopeful as a kid on Christmas morning." At the risk of cursin' us with bad luck, you think maybe we're past the worst of it, Doc?"

"Maybe." Hat found, coat on, he straightened and turned, giving her a look in the faint light from the torches outside. "What I know is, you're no good to me if you let yourself get run down trying to watch out for me. If I say wake me up in three hours, then you come and get me in three hours. I know my goddamn limits."

As stern as he tried to make it, wasn't much could suppress one of Jane's moods, be it good or otherwise, and right now she was shining with pride and excitement at the prospect of the crisis ending thanks to the work they'd done. She just grinned indulgently, like he'd said something funny. "Never said you didn't, Doc. Don't mean it'll kill you to stop shy of 'em now and then, seein' if the chance presents itself."

Cochran blinked, but Jane never was one to stay indoors longer than she had to and she was already turning, heading out the door.

"Meddlesome woman," he muttered, tugging his hat down on his head. "Who the hell's the doctor, anyway?"

* * *

He spent the better part of three hours at the pest tent, half his attention on the dozen or so patients and half on the reverend sleeping restlessly on a corner cot. Cochran stayed alert to any possible sign of seizure, any symptom that might further confirm what, in his gut, he already knew. Like Jane said, better was relative. He knew too well that few hours rest wouldn't make a damn bit of difference against what ailed that poor man. But it seemed to bring him some measure of comfort to minister to the sick, and Cochran wasn't about to forbid it, not when he needed every hand he could get.

In a quiet moment, when most of his charges were asleep and the camp had started to wind down for the night, Cochran stepped out of the tent to get some air -- such as it was in the heavy August heat -- and was surprised to see Jane sitting on a bench outside, propped up against a crooked wall. She saluted him with her bottle, smiling the smile of the thoroughly inebriated. Cochran hesitated, then crossed to join her.

"Thought we agreed you're off duty when I'm on."

"Don't it look like I'm off duty?"

"That's not what I goddamn meant, and you know it."

It failed to dent her good humor. "Have a fuckin' drink with me, Doc."

Sense prompted Cochran to decline, and he knew he'd probably regret it in a few hours when it came time to make sure every man, woman, and child in the camp who hadn't previously been exposed to smallpox got stuck with the vaccine, but it was easier just to take the place Jane made for him, and take the bottle, too.

The whiskey burned going down, and smelled predictably of turpentine, but it wasn't the worst he'd ever tasted.

"How long you been out here?" he asked her, handing the bottle back.

"Long enough." She smiled, enigmatic, a look that said she was feeling no pain, even if she was. For a moment, the expression softened her face into something that suggested the idea that in another life, born to different circumstances and an entirely different set of cards drawn from the deck, Jane Cannary might have been a woman some might have called pretty.

Sitting still, the hard bench unkind to his admittedly bony ass, Cochran felt the weight of too many days on too little sleep start to catch up to him. He took a deeper draught of the rot gut against the feeling, then slipped off his hat and laid it on the barrel beside him, rubbing at the salt he'd sweated out under its edge during the day.

"How's our little ducks?" Jane asked, jerking her chin toward the pest tent. "Still paddlin' their hearts out?"

"Holding their own," Cochran said. After a while, grudgingly, he added, "That young fella Tom brought in, Billy -- his fever's broken."

Jane rolled her head sideways against the wall and gave him one of those deep-seeing, knowing looks that came with alcohol-enhanced insight. "Try not to sound so happy about it, Doc. Don't want anybody thinkin' you're optimistic or nothin'."

Cochran's ire rose, and he aimed a glare her direction. "Optimistic don't figure into it."

"Anyways," Jane said, and settled back into her original, loose-limbed slouch.

They fell quiet. A half-hearted breeze stirred the heavy, late summer night air, the faint scent of evergreens and running water a bare suggestion under the heavier, pervasive scents of human and animal waste, lye, charred meat, and kerosene.

"Charlie's back in camp," Jane said after a while. "Came up to see Bill tonight when I was there."

Cochran just nodded, trying not to show any reaction to speak of. He took a slow pull at the bottle, waiting to see what else she'd say.

"Still can't figure why they left that droop-eyed cocksucker still breathin'."

It took him a moment to realize she meant McCall. "Did he say what happened?"

"Not so's you'd notice." She grabbed the bottle out of his hand and took a deep swallow, some spilling down her chin and onto her jerkin, unheeded. "Don't guess it makes a fuckin' bit of difference to Bill where he is now."

"No, I guess it don't."

They sat in companionable silence, listening to the general, muted ruckus from the joint a couple buildings over. "You mind if I ask you a personal question, Doc?"

He shot her a wary look, sidelong.

"It's just, I reckon you've seen more'n your share of people dyin', is all."

For a moment, flashes of pale, putrid flesh, of mud dark with blood and the scattered glint of splintered bone, of blood-slicked grass and cramped tents like charnel houses and the overpowering scent of rot choked him, and he couldn't answer. He drew a steadying breath, and said evenly, "Fair to say."

Jane's eyes were at half-mast, the whiskey resting comfortable against her thigh, her voice reaching that dreamy slur that said she'd reached the best part of a good drunk, where numbness reigned and the body hadn't yet caught up to the fact that it was slowly being poisoned. "What do you think happens, when a person's left this world? You think we go somewhere's different after this?"

Cochran swallowed. His eyes strayed to a furry shape that scurried across the alley opposite -- a raccoon, foraging for scraps from the food tents the Chinamen set up there during the day. It reminded him unpleasantly of Wu's pigs. "Be nice to think so," he said, the words bitter on his tongue.

Jane sat up straighter, or tried to, fist clenching around the neck of the bottle as she shot him a disgusted look. "What the fuck kind of answer is that?"

Cochran shrank back a little, then snapped, "What do you want me to say?"

"How about answerin' the fuckin' question, is what. Yes or no, is all you have to say. How fuckin' hard is that?"

The fragile thing that was always too close to the surface with her trembled just under the surface of her belligerence; Cochran heard it, and struggled to keep a hold on his temper. "Jane, if I had an answer, I'd tell you. All right? But I don't. I just don't."

"Well, then, why'n the hell didn't you just say so?"

Exasperated, Cochran blew out a breath. "I just did!"

Inexplicably, it seemed to satisfy her, and she subsided, mollified. "Well, all right then."

Cochran stared at her suspiciously for a long moment, feeling a little like a man trapped in a stall with a skittish, wall-eyed horse who liked to kick. She opened one eye, managing to convey impatient irritability, or at least a somewhat bleary, near-sighted approximation.

"And quit starin' at me like that. Makes me nervous."

"I ain't starin' at you, 'cept to wonder whether you're gonna bite my fuckin' hand off next I open my mouth."

The eye closed. "Not if you don't deserve it, I won't."

They lapsed back into silence, and Cochran thought hard about what he'd meant to say in the first place, what he'd been meaning to say for the last few days. She might bite, or she might not. Truth was, Jane's bite wasn't much to speak of, when you got right down to it, and he figured maybe he might as well take a chance.

"You know, you could stay in the camp. More people comin' every day, and there's talk of annexation. Gonna need a real clinic before long. Maybe even a hospital."

At that, she turned her head, and looked at him curious, full on, as if he'd started speaking in some foreign language. The look on her face said clear as day that she couldn't begin to fathom what that had to do with her. "Yeah, I reckon."

"You could do good work in a place like that, is the point I'm tryin' to make."

She barked out a laugh. "Me."

"Yes, you! Why's that so goddamned hard to believe?"

Jane just looked at him like he'd suddenly gone soft in the head, and made an expansive, expressive gesture that took in herself, the camp, the Black Hills, maybe the rest of the world besides.

Cochran huffed an impatient breath. "You're not the only one's got vices, in case you hadn't noticed. Don't mean you can't help people. Don't mean they ain't worth helping."

"I fuckin' know that."

"Well-- I know you do."

She grinned a little, lopsided and drunk and good-humored again. "That's one hell of a persuasive argument style you got there, Doc."

He closed his eyes, exhaustion coming over him in a wave. "Will you just think about it?"

Jane let her shoulder rest against his, and it was hard to say which of them was holding the other up. "Sure, Doc. I'll put it in my fuckin' appointment book."

~ end ~

 


End file.
